


A Graceful Withering

by ice_evanesco



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-09
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-13 21:33:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_evanesco/pseuds/ice_evanesco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finds a portrait of Mycroft, tucked away in the Manor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Graceful Withering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OrphanText](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrphanText/gifts), [General_Button](https://archiveofourown.org/users/General_Button/gifts).



> This is a story written as a promo ficlet series for Cataclysm 2012, a Halloween event for Sherlock, Cabin Pressure, and Cabinlock fandoms that I and my friend co-mod. 
> 
> The blog for the event can be found on tumblr: http://2012-cataclysmic-week.tumblr.com/
> 
> And this is the link to the relevant information for joining and such: http://2012-cataclysmic-week.tumblr.com/post/30088799170/your-footsteps-echo-loudly-on-the-path-dont

"I knew you'd find out." Mycroft said softly.

John turned, then went back to staring at the portrait. It was of an old man, white hair wispy, skin wrinkled, but it was a familiar face, and the inscription below read; "Mycroft Lucian Holmes 1832 - ?"

"W-what? Who's this?" John stammered.

Mycroft smiled, "You know it well enough, even though you want it to not be true." He looked slightly older than moments ago, his face slightly wrinkled. Maybe it was the play of light.

John tossed the cloth over the portrait, covering it, and headed to Mycroft.

He had always known. Always seen it in the wisdom of the other man, and the incongruity of those ancient eyes in that youthful countenance.

Mycroft leaned casually on the door frame of that damnable portrait gallery, but John could already see his weakening.

This aging was surprisingly graceful, like a tree losing its leaves in autumn. But Mycroft made everything look graceful, even his own aging and death. He had a certain flair to him as he went about his ways, dressed in that three-piece suit and those polished obsidian shoes.

John reached Mycroft in time to press a final kiss to his brow, and feel the gentle press of fragile, aged fingers. "I love you." They exhaled in the same, shimmering moment, and both knew it was true. It lasted forever, and an instant, poignant and tragic.

Then the eyes closed. John stood and returned to the portrait. He had lost so much that it was a barely registered thing; Sherlock was dead, and now so was Mycroft. John Watson-Holmes was the last remaining Holmes left.

"The artist captured your eyes beautifully." He whispered, as he looked at the portrait, the essence of the very man who had just left.

There was a glimmer in the painted eyes that might or might not have been tears.


	2. A Slow Crescendo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of prequel to the first chapter; an explanation for why they were in the ancestral home, and how their relationship came to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As before, written as a promo-ficlet for the Cataclysm event. Do check it out and join in the fun!

It was in the aftermath of Sherlock’s death that John had truly seen Mycroft for who he was, and not through Sherlock’s tainted vision.

It was then that he realized that he had done a great disservice to the other man, repulsing him when he tried to approach his brother, treating him with hostility when all he wanted was to take care of Sherlock. When Mycroft stood there, pale, drawn and rigid with dignity and duty as the coffin was lowered into the ground, John could see the broken shards of self-loathing and an overwhelming sense of failure in the other man.

Mycroft’s methods might have been unusual, but weren’t all the members of the Holmes family that way?

It had started with a tentativeness that meant they both never really saw it coming. Mycroft would make phone calls enquiring about John, taking on the burden of grief for two people. Sometimes he would ask John out for tea, or just for a walk. Mycroft was no Sherlock; he wasn’t the type to enjoy a fast paced lifestyle, or getting into danger, but Mycroft was a constant in John’s shaken world. And while Sherlock led and expected John to follow, Mycroft stood and waited for John to catch up, while making wry remarks and exuding a dry humor that John never expected from a man who appeared so staid, and even a little dull.

Slowly, the comparisons to Sherlock faded, and John didn’t see Mycroft as a contrast to Sherlock, nor a replacement for his dead friend, but rather an individual, defined by his own characteristics and idiosyncrasies. By the end of the first year, John’s psychosomatic limp faded, without his notice, until Mycroft made a note of it. That was Mycroft’s style, changing things gradually, quietly.

The relationship had progressed so smoothly that when Mycroft proposed one day, John had immediately agreed, anticipating it already. After all, the other man moved at such a steady pace it was often as though he set one, three, five and ten year plans in everything he did.

The plans were made jointly. Mycroft offered up one of the estates in the Lake District, John said yes. John wrote his guest list, Mycroft added to it. They both decided separately on a quiet ceremony; John not wanting to incite the attention of a blood-thirsty and scandal-starved press, and Mycroft seeing no need for a great fanfare.

They registered the civil partnership, then headed out of London.

The day before the marriage, John found the portrait. 


	3. Finding Happiness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft never really expected to find his happiness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Cataclysm! http://2012-cataclysmic-week.tumblr.com/

Mycroft never really expected to find his happiness.

He never expected happiness to take the form of a stocky, blond army doctor either.

Mycroft had always been rather sickly, and in the Victorian era, that normally meant a short life and an agonizing death via pneumonia. It had been a whim, on his twenty fifth birthday, still unmarried (for who would want to be widowed at a young age, as was almost certain with him), while having his portrait painted, to make a wish.

He remarked idly to the portrait artist, “It would be nice, to be immortalized as this painting will be.”

The portrait artist just smiled, and said, “Would you like it to happen?”

And it had.

But life stayed much the same. He put his talents to use as a consultant for the government, piecing together solutions and answers from the abstract laws and legislations that governed his country.

He had a wife, for a short while, but she died in childbirth, leaving him with a son to bring up. After a short stint at pretending to be motherly, it was perhaps best for the child to be raised by nannies and governesses.

The years passed, and his painting was secreted away. He never looked a day older, even as his son did, aging, withering and dying.

And then it was his grandson.

Then came war at the turn of the century. Two great wars, colonial powers embroiled in brawls that left millions dead and even more wounded, homeless and destitute. He was glad to have made the acquaintance of a Winston Churchill. It left him with very little good opinion on war, and on the needless sacrifice of lives.

He never really stayed the same, his mind always evolving, discarding old values for new, so when feminism, capitalism and Thatcherism came, he was ready, and welcoming… to an extent. When she pushed too much for things to happen, he decided that she should go.

And then the child was born, some distant relation directly down his line, a little boy named Sherlock.

Pale and beautiful, and so very precocious, much brighter than the rest of the Holmes family, and the Holmes family were already among the most brilliant minds to exist.

He watched this child from afar, smiled from a study window as Sherlock crawled, then toddled, then stumbled, from nursery to playroom, to garden. He was proud as any parent would be, and involved himself in the child’s upbringing as much as he could, taking on a greater role after Siger died, leaving the young Violette in charge of a vast estate and the upbringing of a child almost alien in intelligence.

Mycroft was almost a parent to Sherlock, and was devastated when the teenager turned to drugs in a fit of rebellion. He solved it the only way he knew how, by tightening his grip.

But this bird would not be caught, and Sherlock vanished.

But eventually Sherlock emerged, finding himself a job in the most unconventional of ways, and a flat-mate by the name of John Watson.

 


	4. In the Ashes of Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock contemplates Mycroft as he returns home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Sherlock/Cabinlock/Cabin Pressure event, Cataclysmic Week, located [here](http://2012-cataclysmic-week.tumblr.com/).

Sherlock could hardly believe the news.

Mycroft Holmes. Dead.

Anthea’s tone, distraught, lost, yet hiding it to all but the last remaining Holmes had convinced him. And he was in a private plane, on his way back home.

Home, the Holmes Manor, his gilded cage, where Mycroft had sought to keep him safe from the world. Sherlock remembered the place as clearly as though he had left it a few days previously, although it had been almost two decades since he escaped Mycroft’s clutches.

Mycroft… for the lack of any better description, was a constant. He had been there since Sherlock could remember, and that stretched almost as far back as when he was a mere toddler. He had never changed, his principles strong, and unyielding. He was Sherlock’s moral compass, and when Father had died, he had taken on a much larger role, shaping the young child to be an heir and an asset.

He had not minded much back then, glad to make Mycroft and Mummy proud of him.

He glanced away from the window, strapping himself in, as the plane readied for landing, his hands gripping the arms of the seat unexpectedly tightly, as though searching for an anchor.

The ride was silent, Anthea sitting next to him, her fingers flitting over her Blackberry, faithful to Mycroft in a way that Sherlock had never been.

Their conflicts had started when Sherlock started developing his own opinions and aspirations at the tender age of eight. It had been mild at first, Sherlock wanting to wear purple instead of the sensible white that Mummy had bought on Mycroft’s instructions. He had taken matters into his own hands, and dyed the shirts all purple.

They turned out pink, and his hands were similarly stained for several days.

That had sent Mummy into a fit of hysterics, and brought Mycroft home from London. Mummy was needlessly dramatic that way.

And Mycroft had knelt down beside Sherlock, and held his hands. Smiling, he proceeded to tell Sherlock every detail of every chemical compound that had stained his hands that color. After that, they had gone out to buy a wardrobe with more color than mere black and white.

Later conflicts were not resolved as easily. Mycroft wanted Sherlock to study subjects related to governance and politics. Sherlock changed his options after the form was signed by Mycroft. Mycroft wanted the very best for Sherlock, the teenager got himself a place in the second best school in the nation on scholarship.

Their relationship gradually worsened with time, and Sherlock only looked at Mycroft with derision and privately taunted him as being “unnatural”, an “outlier”, and an “anomaly of life”.

And yet, in the end, it turned out that Mycroft was as normal as any of them. One lifetime, no more, no less. He had more years than anyone else, but he had died as everyone did.

There is an end to everyone, and everything.

Sherlock only felt that it was unfair for Mycroft that he had died just shy of true happiness.

That was the true tragedy here; not the death, Sherlock had seen more than enough in his time. Father, a stranger who contributed half his genetic makeup and nothing else. Mummy, who was hysterical and willowy, never the steady guidance that he had so needed. All the victims of various crimes, struck down before their time. Himself. He had died once, leaping into the air, losing John, losing everything in that few seconds.

But Mycroft’s death was what struck him hardest, and the most. His equal, and opposite, his guidance and morality, his teacher, and, just sometimes, his parent. Mycroft who had given so much, received so little, and lost a future of happiness that he so richly deserved less than 24 hours before he would find it.

Leaving Sherlock the unprepared patriarch of the family, which consisted of himself, alone. Being asexual, Sherlock knew that this was the end of the line, all things considered. He was simply uninterested in the whole business of procreation and any gender at all, unable to see other humans (and himself) as anything more than a random aggregate of genes and coagulated cells.

He would have to comfort John, take responsibility, offer him a home, a place to belong within the family. John was family, said the papers signed in his absence, said the engagement ring that would never become a wedding ring, said the smile on both their faces and the genuine warmth in Mycroft’s eyes in their emailed photographs.

Maybe not so alone after all. He still had John. And John loved children. Maybe he could be a gene donor to the next generation, skip the messy part of it. The manor would soon echo with laughs, and childish tricks. Perhaps badly dyed pink shirts too, if they were lucky.

It seemed like hope could blossom in the ashes of grief. It was not much, but it was enough, for now.

 


	5. Each Other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's family. It's all we have. Each other.

Foot steps sounded on the stairs, echoing through the mansion, and laughter sang. Then came the calls, “Uncle Sherlock!”  
  
The aging detective threw down his fountain pen with irritation, and strode out of his own room, wrapped in a similarly aging, threadbare blue silk dressing gown. “Keep the noise down!” He hissed at the pair before him.   
  
They were young adults now, and the pride of the Holmes family. Oliver was the eldest, a coppery-haired young man, reading a law degree in Oxford. He looked up at his biological father (who only ever wanted to be called Uncle Sherlock), with a half smile. “There you are. We leave for term, and suddenly you’ve become adverse to any little noise.”   
  
The elder man folded his arms, and said, “And why have you both returned?”   
  
“Well, it’s Daddy’s birthday.” Ophelia murmured, her storm-grey eyes scanning Sherlock in a disconcertingly familiar manner. At age 59, Sherlock had to admit that he had more than a little of Mycroft’s genetics in him, and his children seemed to have gotten it as well.   
  
Ophelia with her grey eyes, and the attention she paid to her clothing and appearance, and Oliver with his fondness for politics and law, despite attempts made (surreptitiously by Sherlock, to avoid John’s wrath) to sway him towards other subjects. Oliver was also unrepentantly ginger, a fact that made John weep when the boy chose to make his exit from his surrogate’s womb. The prodigal first son, every inch like Mycroft.   
  
“You’ve forgotten.” They pronounced in sync, and Sherlock rolled his eyes. They were nothing like Mycroft and himself, constantly adversarial, and that was a blessing.   
  
“I haven’t forgotten, it slipped my mind.” The man leaned on the banister and looked down at them, and the large package that the servants had helped ship in. “What have you gotten?”   
  
“It’s a surprise.” Ophelia said, cheerfully.   
  
“Hate surprises.” Sherlock murmured, just as John made his own exit.   
  
“Ollie! Ophie-” John gave a delighted cry, and hurried towards the stairs to his children, before Sherlock grabbed his arm.   
  
“You’re not 40 anymore, John. Watch yourself. Hold the banisters. Wouldn’t do to have you crack your head on your birthday.” Sherlock chided as Ophelia darted up the stairs with all the nimbleness that spoke of Sherlock’s own, her dark curls bouncing, before she hugged John, and started to help him down.   
  
The retired consulting detective watched the small family of three with a contentedness that his younger self would have never felt. It had taken him three years after Mycroft’s death to decide on having children via surrogacy. At first, he even thought that they were burdens, leaving them to either John, or nannies, to run off on his cases.   
  
Now he regretted somewhat missing out on their growth, especially at their most easily influenced ages. Perhaps he might have convinced Ollie that Chemistry was the way to go. Still-   
  
He turned to glance at the wall behind him.  
  
Under a large window, Mycroft’s portrait was hung, the man looking uncomfortable and pale in his Victorian clothes, hands placed neatly before him. An addition had been made, that of a ring that resembled Mycroft’s unworn wedding ring. Still- Mycroft would have been proud.   
  
The detective folded his arms and regarded the portrait for a moment more, before a happy cry from John would draw his attention. Yes, the present was exactly as Sherlock had deduced, a portrait.   
  
In it, John and Mycroft stood, hand in hand. Mycroft held a 3 year old Ollie, and John cradled carefully a tiny Ophelia, a few months old. To Mycroft’s left, Sherlock was painted leaning against the frame of the portrait, looking bored.   
  
A smile tugged on the corner of Sherlock’s lips, before a chuckle erupted. Ophelia turned to Sherlock, and said, “What do you think? I painted it myself.”   
  
“It’s a very good likeness.” Sherlock’s blue eyes gleamed, “Very accurate. Possibly the best family portrait that the family gallery has ever seen.”   
  
“Well of course.” Oliver said, folding his arms, and tilting his chin up, looking every inch like Mycroft, “It’s family. It’s all we have. Each other.”

 


End file.
